


In Dreams

by foxsong



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: F/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 08:22:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19786996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxsong/pseuds/foxsong
Summary: MAJOR SHADOWBRINGERS SPOILERS - In dreams she sees him once more. It is hardly surprising; she has had many such specters visit her in her years. This time, however, she seizes the opportunity - a chance to speak whatever was left unsaid, and perhaps even prize an answer from the hidden depths of her own soul.





	In Dreams

**Chapter 1: The Shape of Sorrow**

The Scions -her friends, her _family_ \- shuffle slowly away from scene of battle. Thancred gives an arm to G'raha, who holds steady but looks as though a fair wind could topple him. Y'shtola gently chides and shakes her head at Urianger, while the twins quietly bicker over something Ahru can not quite make out.

She watches them with a smile, a lightness in her chest she has not felt in... years, maybe. Yet so, too, is there a humming tension around her shoulders. The weight of a promise, of a life. The visage of her dear companions is, for a moment, _too_ bright, and she looks away.

Fate, perhaps.

It is tiny, a fragmented shard of auracite, barely any bigger than her pinky nail. It glints in the peculiar light of the phantom city, white with a hint of purple hue. Her lips silently trace over his name.

Then she is knelt down, gently scooping the fragment into her tired hands, still tingling and numb with magic and the strikes of her sword against - _against_...

Before she knows it she is gripping the shard tight against her heart, eyes shut firm against the hot onslaught of fresh tears.

"Ahru..." Ryne's voice might have caused her to start, but it is so soft and gentle, as the girl places her hand against the warriors shoulder. She can not quite understand, Ahru thinks; she is perplexed, but _trying_.

Shaking her head, Ahru swallows some wretched sob back deep into her chest and wipes at her eyes with the back of one hand.

"Sorry, Ryne... It's just..." What? _Sad_? By the stars, it goes so much deeper than that. _Were there even words in mortal tongues to convey such a depth of grief?_ For a moment, she wonders if Emet-Selch did not take all his despairs and lay them within her own breast, a monument to the promise she made.

"It's a lot..." Ryne spoke up when the silence dragged on for a beat too long, kneeling down beside her. "But we're here with you."

Despite herself, a few tears drip down over her lashes as Ahru blinks at the girl, momentarily dumbfounded and enlightened all at once.

_“Don’t make a choice that leaves you alone. Nothing is worth that - especially not eternity."_

It ached... _Gods_ how it ached. Yet holding the shard tightly in one hand, she reached the other out to rest atop Ryne's head, smiling.

"I know that now. Thank you, Ryne." With a quiet sigh she rose up, the girl following in her stead. She did not look entirely convinced, watching Ahru with an uncertain gaze, but finally managed a smile and nodded in turn.

"Then let us not keep our friends waiting."

Their friends - _their family_ \- stood some distance away now, stopped and turned towards them, waiting patiently. Alisaie half-bent as if to run back out of concern, but straightened quickly as they moved to catch up.

Ryne cast a glance back at her, and she nodded, spurring the girl into a jog to catch up while she followed behind -

and quietly tucked the shard into her pocket.

It would make for a nice necklace. Not a trophy, or badge of victory... A reminder of the promise made. One she would keep with her always. 

* * *

Ever since she was young, she would sometimes have peculiar dreams. The kind she knew were dreams, ones that spoke to her of secret things. She'd seen burning stars and black-pelted wolves, shadows that moved across a scarred land...

This dream was, and was not, quite like those ones. She stood upon a black platform, flecked with lines of dark purples that to her now felt like... _roots_ somehow. If she closed her eyes and let it be, she could sink down deep into the dark abyss through them...

Of far more interest, however, was the figure stood before her. She had known, instinctively, where she was. That hollow place Emet-Selch had made to be the stage of their final act. No, it was still all so very clear in her heart and in her mind; she _vowed_ she would not forget after all, not one single detail.

So it was of little surprise that he would be there, too. Clad in the robes she'd seen on him last, that glowing shape carved into the center of him. It ached to see it, brought stinging sharpness to her eyes as her hands gripped over her own heart.

For an instant he had looked no more than a shade that might torment her, as she had suffered in many dreams. Accusing figures sending doubts throughout every corner of her subconscious. But then he tilted his head, a strangely gentle expression catching his golden eyes.

"Now, why-ever are you looking at me like _that_ , hero?" The touch of condescending and boredom, the drawling over certain vowels. He sounded much the same as he had in Rak'tika, or the Ocular, or anywhere else in all their travels together...

If it was only a dream, she could speak freely, couldn't she? There was ease in that, and she felt the dam within her begin to give way as she shook her head.

"I know the shape now..." she folds her arms around herself tightly. All her life she had felt such a keen, soul-deep loneliness. ' _Hiraeth_ ', the name an Ascian had given her family. Given _her_. "The moment I saw Amaurot, I knew... It was so... big. So grand and..." Swallowing, she shook her head, clenching her eyes shut.

"Too much for one so small as you to bear." Emet-Selch's voice was quieter now, _gentle_. Perhaps pitying, or... _empathizing_?

"Too much for any one soul to bear..." she whispers, echoing the Exarch's words - ones that now seem so long ago, even if it hadn't been.

Slowly she moved towards him, focusing her blurred vision on his figure as firmly as she dared. _Dreams could be such fickle things_ , the way they shifted and changed, or gave way to waking. He looks remarkably perplexed as she reaches her hand out to him, hovering just above that gaping wound glimmering with aetheric light.

"And it wasn't..." She purses her trembling lips a moment, hating how weak it sounds even in her mind. Even in a dream. "It wasn't _fair_. Everything you placed on me." Her fingers curl into a fist that she presses against his chest, just above the wound. "I had to prove to you... _what_?"

With the threats on the First, taking all that Light within her, what was she supposed to have done? She had weeks, months, to figure something out he'd already had the answer to centuries in the making. Far be it from her to search for pity, or whine of the inherent unfairness of the world, but he was supposed to be _better_ than them, wasn't he?

She remembered the gentle voices of the Amaurotines, the way they crouched low to be at level with her. Never once had she felt condescended to, or _less than_. They were powerful, and wise, without cruelty. She knows, of course, he is different from those bygone days. He is tempered, and bitter, and mournful in the face of his mistakes. This understanding does not make it any easier.

A storm bellows up from within and she curls in on herself a little - almost as if to launch into attack. Instead came biting words that did nothing to conceal her anger and anguish. "What did you want me to prove? What could I have *possibly* done any differently? In mere seconds compared to your _eons_?"

His hand comes up to her wrist, the claws cold but gently clasped as he sighs. "That's precisely it. You couldn't, just as none before you could. Proof of your broken, lacking nature."

She tore her hand away and glowered at him - _the edges of the claws felt cool, almost cutting_ , but in her swirl of emotions she paid it no mind.

"A test none could ever pass in your eyes." Yet despite all the heat rolling off of her, he remained coolly indifferent. The hint of condescending was there, yes, but he was not entirely looking down his nose at her either.

... _Height difference aside_.

Quiet took up the space between them for a moment, as she struggled to hold her emotions in check, and he... He simply watched her. As she had thought many times before, she got the impression there was no hiding anything from him. That somehow he saw thoughts and emotions writ on her aether as plainly as if they might have been penned in a journal.

Finally, he spoke again. "You may yet surprise me."

Her brows rose, and then her eyes narrowed, ears flattening back against her head. Those words, simple enough, called to mind a prior statement of his. _'You disappoint me._ ’ Even now she had a hard time grappling with how hard those words had struck her. She'd never been one to seek approval - not _usually_ , and certainly not from someone such as him, and yet...

 _She had wanted so much to prove him wrong_. To be whatever it was he was looking for, to reward his faith, to find a path that they might be able to walk together. Idealistic, foolishly so, but it had always been in her. Even since Lahabrea at Praetorium, and then Arshadaya and...

 _The shape of the emptiness in her was this, she knew_. The truth buried deep within her fragmented soul. With the piece that had once been Ardbert returned, she understood that a little better. So it was that there too did her grief originate. _Why did the people closest to all of her hearts answers need be her bitterest of enemies?_

Softly... desperately... _what she wanted most of all was_...

Emet-Selch leaned to better catch her gaze with his, waving one hand. "Are you there, hero?"

She blinked up at him, stirring from reverie within reverie. Her thoughts had begun to stray, and the fog of sleep had begun to cloud this dream.

"Here..." she answered, shaking her head clear. "Yes, I'm here..." She cast her gaze around them, her thoughts all askew. Beyond the platform was only pitch black, yawning wide unto eternity. Her lips felt numb as she tried to re-assert herself in the moment. She had been so angry, so sad just a moment ago, and now she felt... tired. As if she'd been crying herself to sleep. "You said..."

"It hardly matters. You're in no position yet for these words to find meaning."

"It means something..." It was a whisper; her body felt so far away, her mind somewhere else, her voice further. _Stars, how badly she wanted..._ What? What was it she wanted?

"Home."

Clarity came crashing down around her so sharp as to nearly set her to stumbling. Staring at him with wide, questioning eyes he sighed once more and shook his head in exasperation.

"You want to go home, don't you?" He came closer again, that clawed hand tracing her jawline, bright amber eyes overtaking everything else, even the darkness. His voice low, barely a spoken thing at all - it is a murmur from the aether, pressing gently against the heart of her. It is the voice of Hades, in all his glory and agony, echoing timelessly on the fringes of her mind. "That is all any of us have ever wanted."

"Home..." she repeats, nodding. The ache in her chest sings with that word, the aetherlight in his fades - the wound fades to nothing at all. Her eyes move down to it, a hand tentatively reaching out - fingertips barely brushing the fabric of his cloak made whole again. "Home."

 _It is there, right there, right in front of her_. There is a pulse of anticipation, _excitement_ , at the prospect of wrapping her hands around it, her mind, and _knowing_.

Emet-Selch smiles. Ahru wakes.

**Author's Note:**

> Part 1 of ??? :|a By the nature of a dream, I thought it should be a bit confusing... but hopefully not -too- confusing.


End file.
